Francisco Ruiz-Aliseda

Platform Competition, Compatibility, and Social Efficiency

Katz and Shapiro (1985) study systems compatibility in settings with one-sided platforms and direct network externalities. We consider systems compatibility in settings with two-sided platforms and indirect network externalities to develop an explanation why markets with two-sided platforms are often characterized by incompatibility with one dominant player who may subsidize access to one side of the market. We find that incompatibility gives rise to asymmetric equilibria with a dominant platform that earns more than under compatibility. We also find that incompatibility generates larger total welfare than compatibility when horizontal differences between platforms are small.

Adoption is Not Development: First Mover Advantages in the Diffusion of New Technology

The diffusion of new technology among competing firms is of long-standing interest in industrial organization. There is an extensive theoretical literature on technology adoption in which firms can instantaneously deploy a new technology in the market at a cost that is exogenously falling over time. While such models explain diffusion (firms adopt asynchronously), Fudenberg and Tirole (1985) show that the incentives to preemptively adopt in sub-game perfect equilibria can cause rents to be equalized across firms. In contrast, we study technology development where costly and time consuming effort is required to deploy a new technology. With diminishing returns to instantaneous effort, delaying deployment reduces the firms cost, as in adoption models. However, the incentive to preempt is lower: with its development already partially complete, a preempted firm delays deployment less than with adoption. We provide reasonable conditions under which the sub-game perfect equilibrium outcome corresponds that in the pre-commitment equilibrium first proposed by Reinganum (1981a, 1981b), yielding both diffusion and first mover advantages for the case of technology development.

Equilibrium Innovation Ecosystems: The Dark Side of Collaborating with Complementors

The recent years have exhibited a burst in the amount of collaborative activities among fi…rms selling complementary products. This paper aims at providing a rationale for such a large extent of collaboration ties among complementors. To this end, we analyze a game in which the two producers of a certain component have the possibility to form pairwise collaboration ties with each of the two producers of a complementary component. Once ties are formed, each of the four fi…rms decides how much to invest in improving the quality of the match with each possible complementor, under the assumption that collaborating with a complementor makes it cheaper to invest in enhancing match quality with such complementor. Once investment choices have taken place, all fi…rms choose prices for their respective components. Our main fi…nding in this setting is that fi…rms end up forming as many collaboration ties as it is possible, although they would all prefer a scenario where collaboration were forbidden, unlike a social planner.

Strategic Commitment Versus Flexibility in a Duopoly With Entry and Exit

We present a continuous-time real options game in which two firms must decide at each instant of time whether to be in or out of a market that expands up to a random maturity date and contracts thereafter. Firms differ only in the opportunity costs of usage of the assets they employ (e.g., owing to different redeployment or resale values), so their investments are not equally recoverable. The paper disentangles the numerous aspects that affect the order of entry and exit, and it challenges the common wisdom that a firm with a sunk cost higher than that of its sole competitor is credibly committed to fight for the market (if necessary) and is worse shielded against the adverse effects of uncertainty. Our analysis also shows that the destructive effect of the threat of preemption on option values may be softened if the rivals commitment to remain active after investing is not credible.

Entry Patterns Over the Product Life Cycle

We study a game-theoretic real options model of new market entry based on empirical evidence of demand for a new product growing over time and eventually falling. Yet, firms do not know ex ante when this will occur, which creates incentives to update information by delaying irreversible entry. By assuming that the construction of a new productive plant takes some time and is unobservable in the meantime, while operation in the market is not, we show that entry rates increase or decrease under certain conditions related to the rate at which flow profits decrease as more firms enter the industry.

Competitive Intensity and Its Two-Sided Effect on the Boundaries of Firm Performance

The new perspective emerging from strategy’s value-capture stream is that the effects of competition are twofold: competition for an agent bounds its performance from below, while that for its transaction partners bounds from above. Thus, assessing the intensity of competition on either side is essential to understanding firm performance. Yet, the literature provides no formal notion of “competitive intensity” with which to make such assessments. Rather, some authors use added value as their central analytic concept, others the core. Added value is simple but misses the crucial, for-an-agent side of competition. The core is theoretically complete but difficult to interpret and empirically intractable. This paper formalizes three, increasingly general notions of competitive intensity, all of which improve on added value while avoiding the complexity of the core. We analyze markets characterized by disjoint networks of agents (e.g., supply chains), providing several insights into competition and new tools f...

Entry into complementary good markets with network effects

We study whether complementarities can help a firm enter a market with strong network effects and incumbency advantages. We find that bundling the network good with a complementary good, or using the network good as a loss leader (i.e., pricing below marginal cost) can facilitate entry, but that these strategies involve costs that may render them undesirable for the entrant. We also find that the entrant always prefers to make the complementarity general (so that the incumbent benefits from it as well) over having a firm-specific complementarity and using a loss leading strategy. Pricing and product design strategies are interdependent: bundling (unbundled pricing) should be used if and only if the complementarity is specific (general). Finally, we find that bundling may be socially optimal because it allows entrants to challenge incumbents in markets with network effects, thereby expanding the complementary benefits enjoyed by consumers. This finding contrasts wit the standard view of regulators, who see bundling as a way to foreclose entry and prevent competition, as in the recent case of the European Commission vs. Google.